Volvo V40 Cross Country D4 SE Nav Geartronic

It’s often the smallest thing which can colour your views on a car, by reinforcing the feel or a lack of quality. Such as tyre valve caps for instance... In the three months that I’ve been running the Volvo V40 so far, the tyre pressure monitoring system has twice flashed up on the dash to say one of the tyres needs some extra air. This technology is now mandatory on new cars sold across the EU, so it’ll be interesting to see how many drivers either get false alerts or drive on regardless, with their dash lit up like a Christmas tree. Neither of the alerts were false in my case, although each time, the system told me only one tyre needed to be topped up. That’s despite the fact that the first time there were two tyres that had gone down by around 5psi, while three of the four tyres were down by around that amount on the most recent occasion.

The first time the warning flashed up, I was part-way through a long night-time motorway journey on an unlit stretch of the M40. With more than 100 miles to go, the dash suddenly warned me of a flat tyre. Had it gone down marginally, or was I about to experience a high-speed calamity? I pulled in at the next services and everything looked fine, so I checked everything the next morning at home.

A couple of tyres had dropped to 28psi from the regulation 33psi for no apparent reason. A month later, the same thing happened again. Each time I’ve topped up the tyres with my 12-volt compressor, I’ve had to first remove the plastic caps to get to the valves, and I can’t remember the last time I handled something so apparently cheap from a premium car maker. I have a thing about checking tyre pressures, so I’ve handled plenty of valve caps over the years and there’s a boast you probably won’t see again any time soon. Some cars come with caps made of metal, which feel substantial when you remove them.

Most come with black plastic affairs that don’t feel expensive, but they don’t feel as though they’re about to disintegrate either. But the V40 comes with thin plastic caps finished in silver paint, which look and feel as though they’ve come out of a Christmas cracker. A rather weird Christmas cracker at that... With no damage to any of the tyres, I don’t know why the pressure drops in them sometimes; the fronts have also gone down by a few psi in the three months since the car was delivered.

But cheap caps or not, it’s good to know that the car is monitoring the pressure at each corner, and that it’s reasonably sensitive without being too much so and that way I don’t have to wield my tyre gauge too often.